RICH MAN, POOR MAN : In a battle of budgets, two world travelers enjoy opposite extremes on the Big Island of Hawaii

Golf Digest, March, 2001 by Tom Callahan, Dave Kindred

Naniloa is a flat, simple, public course distinguished by bottlebrush trees. It costs $32 for 18 holes with a cart. Players wear blue jeans, shorts, tank tops, T-shirts and sneakers. No signs identify tees and yardages; tee markers are concrete blocks halved, sometimes doubling as trash bins. Fathers and sons tee it up at twilight.

In the gloaming, my second shot at 18 stopped so near the cup that even I made a birdie--with a witness to boot, an old, graying, one-legged man on the starter's bench.

"A 5-iron?" he said, as if he'd seen me swing a thousand times rather than once.

"Yes, sir."

"167 yards."

"I don't know."

"167 yards," he said, not asking, telling.

William (Chu-Chu) Kanuha is 82, a native of Hilo, once a banker, now retired. Evenings he brings in Naniloa's flagsticks.

"I've always lived here," he said. "Except for World War II. Europe, Germany. That's where I got this guy."

He touched his prosthesis. He also has a new hip joint.

I asked, "Do you get to play much?"

"Four or five times a week is all."

For $19.50 with cart, we played at Hilo Municipal, a real golf course with lava-rock stream beds and elevated, tilted greens granting no favors to the incompetent.

As for how we played, I'm happy to report the result:

The one-legged hustler won the money.

Then he chauffeured me to dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant, after which he suggested where I should play next.

"Volcano," he said. "No better place on Earth."

You drive south on Route 11. You round a rising curve. Sha-zaam!

Suddenly, your eyes can't see it all. Mauna Loa fills the sky. It's an active volcano 13,677 feet high. Its slopes fall 30 and 40 miles to the ocean. Measured from the ocean floor, the volcano is twice as high as that Himalayan pimple, Mount Everest. It's the largest volcanic land mass in the world.

You look, awed, and you decide, yes, gods live up there.

For $63, you can play golf on the gods' grounds.

Even as I paid, Reynold Lee, then the pro at Volcano Golf & Country Club, asked, "What're you doing all the way out here?"

"My buddy's at the Four Seasons on the other side of the island, and I'm at Uncle Billy's."

"You got ripped."

Au contraire. Wild turkeys on the Volcano's seventh fairway. Seldom-seen Hawaiian hawks above the second. Nene geese nesting (signs advise that anyone harming the state bird can be fined $250,000). Pine and ohia trees decorate Volcano's testy layout.

I hooked up with Mike Combs and Skip Langell, mainlanders-turned-Hawaiians who play together at Volcano maybe 240 times a year.

"The climate's perfect here," Combs said. "It's quiet, and it's beautiful. Because it's out of the way--you're probably the only 'tourist' here--it's not crowded. It's one of the few places in Hawaii that you can play in four hours, not six."

"This golf course," Langell said, "is the best-kept secret in Hawaii."

Good. Otherwise, anyone who ever stood on the third tee would invite a thousand friends to Volcano next week. From that tee, you see the snowcapped summit of Mauna Loa and you hear--yes, you hear--a whisper, "Stay. Right here. Stay."